Discourse style and situation viewpoint for a conversational language tutor

Abstract

Discourse style and situational viewpoint are key elements of an immersion-style language tutor. In order to achieve conversational continuity, such a system needs to maintain a model of goals, actions and states in the microworld along with tools to manage discourse. The discourse management tools include various dialog schemas composed of interaction types. These schemas guide the communication protocol between the student and the tutor. Another tool is the type of view that one takes of what occurs in the microworld. The various view types in our taxonomy provide a mechanism for generating comments on those aspects of the microworld that are relevant while using a particular interaction type. In sum, we have devised a variety of interaction types and views and shown how to use them in the construction of a bimodal, bidirectional communication system for immersive foreign language learning.